Triple Helix is a concept which has become quite popular in innovation studies and relates to the idea of new and value-creating partnerships between public, private and academic entities leading to knowledge-based endless accumulation of capital. Basically it involves the creation of linkages between essentially the government, business and the university, bringing them together in forms of cooperation which drive innovation processes in the economy. It means first ensuring different institutional actors active in social, economic, political and cultural systems in the national space are wired and then attempting to find ever-new and innovative pathways linking them together.
The goal of these interconnections is not only to create a never-ending expansion of economic value and to save time, labour and bring down costs but also to accumulate social gains distributed far and wide for the benefit of all members of society regardless of their place and role in the production structure of a society. The focus of triple-helix shifts the emphasis of economic activity from penny-pinching money-making to creating a more prosperous society by redefining entrepreneurship to include social welfare as one of the cardinal aims of business.
At the level of policy, it means integrating different policies such as the economic, social, industrial, education, health, labour, technology, security and defense, etc., to create a society which prioritises people instead of profit. Increasingly, this kind of policy integration is being carried out through the formulation of innovation policies across both the developed and the developing worlds.
Michael Porter, the leading authority on firm innovation and competitiveness, has advocated the idea of “shared value” in his January 2011 article, titled, “The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value”, co-authored with Mark R. Kramer in the Harvard Business Review. The authors of this article envision shared value as the way to make business-society interaction mutually beneficial. This beneficial mutuality, in their view, is to be achieved by recomposing the ends of capital to include providing solutions to urgent social problems rather than simply act as donors and purveyors of charity to justify pompous statements of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and escape social accountability. Shared value, they say, is a sure-fire way for increasing profitability in every sense of the word for both business and society. The authors find fault with the government for legislation that promotes hostility or coldness between business and society and makes the latter view the former as a hampering liability and makes the former view the latter as a parasitic force that pushes negative externalities on to the latter. Shared value, according to them, is a way of doing business that “recognizes that societal needs, not just conventional economic needs, define markets” and means changing governmental regulation of the business-society relationship to promote increased cooperation.
It does not take an extravagant expenditure of mental energy to realise that productivity increase is a matter not exclusively limited to changing the production function alone but presupposes the creation of a healthy and contented society favourably disposed towards the end of making profit. Triple Helix has the immense potential to lay the basis for the creation of “shared value” across the developing world because it is the developing world which needs this triadic cooperation more than anything else to solve a multitude of problems which plague it. Triple Helix has been identified as a potential form of doing things in Pakistan’s policy discourse but it is still limited to the sphere of higher education and is mainly seen as an element in the reconstitution of the Pakistani university. If one were to carry out a thorough-going survey of the policy space of our country one would find many such policy traps in which an approach and its operative concepts are imprisoned in just one narrow sphere of action without any attempt to imagine or see its applicability across a range of contexts. There is a need first to rescue Triple Helix from the policy trap in which it is incarcerated by the specialist tunnel vision of our policy makers, second to conceive of the breadth of vision and function it allows and then to put this comprehensive concept into action to have equally wide effects.
Dengue virus is raging across our country. Our countrymen are dying of it by the day. Anyone of us may fall a victim to it. The government alone cannot fight this threat. Now, more than ever, there is a need and an opportunity to create shared value by the big business – banks, corporations, firms, industry etc. – of Pakistan through funding vaccination research for the virus and then marketing it at affordable rates not only in Pakistan but exporting it to other affected countries. This virus has the potential to operationalise Triple Helix in Pakistan. The Pakistani big business likes to wear its patriotism on its sleeve. Now is the time for it to roll up its sleeves and buckle down to the task the country and the people require of it. The big business should fund and support anti-dengue research for selfish reasons too as it would always need a healthy workforce to make the profits that make it big and Dengue threatens the very basis of business by threatening public health. The government should also concentrate on investigating the outbreak rather than simply blaming it on the rains. More importantly, one should know that since Dengue, like nature, does not discriminate between the rich and the poor and bites everyone equally and indiscriminately, it needs big business’s resources to be fought effectively.
The writer is a Senior Policy Analyst working for the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation and can be contacted at [email protected].
